unbosom

unbosom (oneself) to (someone)

To share one's deepest or most intimate emotions, thoughts, or secrets with someone else, especially in a profuse or sudden manner. I had simply asked him how things had been, when suddenly he unbosomed himself to me about all the problems he and his wife had been experiencing lately. I apologize for unbosoming myself to you like that. I'd been holding on to that secret for a long time and just had to tell someone. I hadn't expected her to unbosom herself to me with a confession of love, but it made my heart soar to hear it.
See also: unbosom
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

unbosom oneself to someone

Fig. to reveal one's inner thoughts and secrets to someone. He unbosomed himself to his best friend. Todd unbosomed himself to almost everyone he met.
See also: unbosom
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • unbosom (oneself) to (someone)
  • unbosom oneself to
  • pour out one's heart
  • pour (one's) heart out (to someone)
  • pour heart out to
  • pour out (one's) heart (to someone)
  • pour your heart out
  • pour out (one's) soul (to someone)
  • pour (one's) soul out (to someone)
  • pour out soul
References in periodicals archive
(or Father) Chillingworth has neither absolution nor cure in mind, and the guilt-ridden minister, preternaturally sensitive as he is, intuits as much and refuses to unbosom. Noting, as a therapist might, that bodily infirmities are but "symptom[s] of some ailment" in the mind (114), Chillingworth encourages his patient to tell all only in order to torture him.
While Lu's point that he would rather "let the empirical evidence unbosom itself" than "elaborate on a purely conceptual discussion" (p.
Baillie never explicitly foregrounds the closet as a site of theoretical speculation; rather, like other "lonely haunts," "chambers," or even the "lonely desert," it signifies an imaginary zone of concealment and absolute privacy where powerful passions "cannot unbosom themselves even to the dearest friend." According to Baillie, in the name of "sympathetic curiosity" we all want to know what people are thinking and feeling in these most isolated zones, and her series of plays is designed to be morally uplifting by satisfying this desire to witness "those passions which conceal themselves from the observation of men." The closet is thus only one of a number of metaphors implying the possibility of experiencing "sympathetic curiosity" by witnessing people in the most trying situations.
Like its simpler predecessor, Clarissa investigates the idea that the self may be disclosed, minutely and in all its secret impulses, in the cumulative increments of epistolary exchange; and just as the novel's correspondents progressively unbosom themselves over time to their fictional addresses, so Richardson now mimicked the effect for his readers by spreading publication over a matching period.
The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring Would soon unbosom all their echoes mild, And I (for grief is easily beguiled) Might think the infection of my sorrows loud, Had got a race of mourners on some pregnant cloud.
Not long ago a decidedly unelated Joe called to unbosom himself of a growing unease over President Bush's new multilateralism.
"A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably," - William Penn, entrepreneur
During the recent convention of representatives from Harvard, Yale, and other colleges to consider the subject of athletics, one of the speakers unbosomed himself thus: Athletics have come to the pass where they are no longer fair and open trials of strength and skill, but on the contrary, as at present conducted, they train the young men to look upon victory as the rewards of treachery and deceit.